“I wasn’t there. Just one day they told us Kathleen had gone away and she wouldn’t be coming back. I knew she was dead.”
“How did you know?”
“I just knew. She cried all the time, she said she was going to tell. They always said they’d kill any of us if they thought we were going to tell.”
“Kathleen was strangled, Lucy.”
“Was she?”
“Yes. Just like the girls we found in your cellar. Ligature strangulation. Remember, those yellow fibers we found under you fingernails, along with Kimberley’s blood.”
“Where are you going with this, Superintendent?” Julia Ford asked.
“There are a lot of similarities between the crimes. That’s all.”
“But surely the killers of Kathleen Murray are behind bars?” Julia argued. “It’s got nothing to do with Lucy.”
“She was involved.”
“She was a victim.”
“Always the victim, eh, Lucy? The victim with the bad memory. How does it feel?”
“That’s enough,” said Julia.
“It feels awful,” Lucy said in a small voice.
“What?”
“You asked how it feels, to be a victim with a bad memory. It feels awful. It feels like I have no self, like I’m lost, I have no control, like I don’t count. I can’t even remember the bad things that happened to me.”
“Let me ask you once more, Lucy: Did you ever help your husband to abduct a young girl?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you ever harm any of the girls he brought home?”
“I never knew about them, not until last week.”
“Why did you get up and go down in the cellar on that particular night? Why not on any of the previous occasions when your husband was entertaining a young girl in the cellar of your house?”
“I never heard anything before. He must have drugged me.”
“We found no sleeping tablets in our search of the house, nor do either of you have a prescription for any.”
“He must have got them illegally. He must have run out. That’s why I woke up.”
“Where would he get them?”
“School. There’s all sorts of drugs in schools.”
“Lucy, did you know that your husband was a rapist when you met him?”
“Did I… what?”
“You heard me.” Banks opened the file in front of him. “By our count he had already raped four women we know of before he met you at that pub in Seacroft. Terence Payne was the Seacroft Rapist. His DNA matches that left in the victims.”
“I – I-”
“You don’t know what to say?”
“No.”
“How did you meet him, Lucy? None of your friends remember seeing you talk to him in the pub that night.”
“I told you. I was on my way out. It was a big pub, with lots of rooms. We went into another bar.”
“Why should you be any different, Lucy?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, why didn’t he follow you out into the street and rape you like he did with the others?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“You’ve got to admit it’s strange, though, isn’t it?”
“I told you, I don’t know. He liked me. Loved me.”
“Yet he still continued to rape other young women after he’d met you.” Banks consulted his file again. “At least two more times, according to our account. And they’re only the ones who reported it. Some women don’t report it, you know. Too upset or too ashamed. See, they blame themselves.” Banks thought of Annie Cabbot, and what she’d been through over two years ago.
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Why didn’t he rape you?”
Lucy gave him an unfathomable look. “Maybe he did.”
“Don’t be absurd. No woman likes being raped, and she’s certainly not going to marry her rapist.”
“You’d be surprised what you can get used to if you’ve got no choice.”
“What do you mean, no choice?”
“What I say.”
“It was your choice to marry Terry, wasn’t it? Nobody forced you to.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
“Come on.”
“Never mind.”
Banks shuffled his papers. “What was it, Lucy? Did he tell you about what he’d done? Did it excite you? Did he recognize a kindred spirit? Your Hindley to his Brady?”
Julia Ford shot to her feet. “That’s enough, Superintendent. One more remark like that and this interview’s over and I’ll be reporting you.”
Banks ran his hand over his closely cropped hair. It felt spiky.
Winsome picked up the questioning. “Did he rape you, Lucy?” she asked, in her lilting Jamaican accent. “Did your husband rape you?”
Lucy turned to look at Winsome and seemed to Banks to be calculating how to deal with this new factor in the equation.
“Of course not. I would never have married a rapist.”
“So you didn’t know about him?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you find anything odd about Terry? I mean, I never knew him, but it sounds to me as if there’s enough there to give a person cause for concern.”
“He could be very charming.”
“Did he do or say nothing to make you suspicious in all the time you were together?”
“No.”
“But, somehow, you ended up married to a man who was not only a rapist but also an abductor and murderer of young girls. How can you explain that, Lucy? You’ve got to admit it’s highly unusual, hard to believe.”
“I can’t help that. And I can’t explain it. That’s just how it happened.”
“Did he like to play games, sexual games?”
“Like what?”
“Did he like tying you up? Did he like to pretend he was raping you?”
“We didn’t do anything like that.”
Winsome gave Banks a signal to take over again, and her look mirrored his feelings; they were getting nowhere, and Lucy Payne was probably lying.
“Where’s the camcorder?” Banks asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We found evidence in the cellar. A camcorder had been set up at the end of the bed. I think you liked to video what you were doing to the girls.”
“I didn’t do anything to them. I’ve told you, I didn’t go down there, except maybe the once. I know nothing about any camcorder.”
“You never saw your husband with one?”
“No.”
“He never showed you any videos?”
“Only rented or borrowed ones.”
“We think we know where he bought the camcorder, Lucy. We can check.”
“Go ahead. I never saw one, never knew about any such thing.”
Banks paused and changed tack. “You say you didn’t play sexual games, Lucy, so what made you decide to dress up and act like a prostitute?” Banks asked.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t it. I mean, I didn’t… I wasn’t on the street or anything. Who told you that?”
“Never mind. Did you pick up a man in a hotel bar for sex?”
“What if I did? It was just a lark, a dare.”
“So you did like games.”
“This was before I knew Terry.”
“So that makes it all right?”
“I’m not saying that. It was a lark, that’s all.”
“What happened?”
Lucy gave a sly smile. “Same as happened often enough if I let myself get chatted up in a pub. Only this time I got paid two hundred pounds. Like I said, it was a lark, that’s all. Are you going to arrest me for prostitution?”
“Some lark,” said Banks.
Julia Ford looked a bit perplexed by the exchange, but she said nothing.
Banks knew they were still going nowhere. Hartnell was right: they had no real evidence against Lucy beyond the extreme weirdness of her relationship with Payne and the tiny bloodstains and rope fibers. Her answers might not make a lot of sense, but unless she confessed to aiding and abetting her husband in his murders, she was in the clear. He looked at her again. The bruises had almost faded to nothing and she looked quite innocent and lovely with her pale skin and long black hair, almost like a Madonna. The only thing that made Banks persist in his belief that there was far more to events than she would ever care to admit was her eyes: black, reflective, impermeable. He got the impression that if you stared into eyes like hers for too long you’d go mad. But that wasn’t evidence; that was an overactive imagination. All of a sudden, he’d had enough. Surprising all three of them, he stood up so abruptly he almost knocked over his chair, said, “You’re free to go now, Lucy. Just don’t go too far,” and hurried out of the interview room.